When Your Church is Happy You Are Sick
Living life with chronic illness comes with its own struggles to overcome, along with the added reality that your new "normal" may look entirely different. Of all the many things a person faces when confronted with an unexpected health condition, the questions of Why me? Why this? What did I do to deserve my health failing? can often be visited in the mind of a chronically ill patient. I grew up in an environment that always knew the answer to these questions: God made you sick. Witnessing a manner of all illness afflict many an individual during my time in the Christian Fundamentalist movement, I don't have to traverse long down a path in my mind to recall the reasons why God would allow sickness in a follower's life. It was always one of two reasons: A trial for a believer to overcome and bring God the glory once they were healed, or the direct result of an unrepentant sin committed. The latter reasoning tended to be the most widely accepted opinion in-group. It s...